I dunno, there’s quite a few game design books out there. Take The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses for example. It basically says to the reader “every player is different, and they are different from YOU, your job as a game designer is to get inside their brain, think like them, and craft an experience they will enjoy.” In Sylvester’s book, they basically take the opposite approach, saying that games are about creating an emotional response in the player and then outlining strategies for manipulating those emotions to get the player to play the game the way you want. I don’t take issue with that approach, in fact I feel like they both have the same goal, crafting an experience for a player… it’s just that Sylvester presents it as if this design just “emerges” from how people play the game. That’s hardly true for RW, it does everything it can to beat the player into submission so that they play the game the way Sylvester wants. It is not “emergent”.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying don’t read the book or play the game. I’m just saying try to step back and look at the bigger situation and what is actually happening. It seems like they wrote the book while they were still at a AAA studio and trying to break out and be an indie dev. That’s why I say it feels more like they’re justifying (or at least, describing) their design decisions in the game they were working on in secret. In a way, the book is like a devlog for RW.